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For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Shakespeare. Romances / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-869-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3601-1 (e-book) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Tragicomedies. 2. Tragicomedy—History and criticism. I. Bloom, Harold. PR2981.5.W56 2010 822.3'3—dc22 2010028993 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Composition by IBT Global, Troy, NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy, NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy, NY Date printed: November 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Shakespeare’s Romances: The Winter’s Tale 3 Northrop Frye Cymbeline: The Rescue of the King 17 Ruth Nevo The Crime and Conversion of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale 45 René Girard Virtue, Vice, and Compassion in Montaigne and The Tempest 71 Arthur Kirsch ‘Near Akin’: The Trials of Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen 87 Alan Stewart Troilus and Cressida 103 W.H. Auden vi Contents The Consolation of Romance: Providence in Shakespeare’s Late Plays 119 Richard Harp In the Shadow of Hamlet: Comedy and Death in All’s Well That Ends Well 139 Alexander Leggatt Chronology 151 Contributors 153 Bibliography 155 Acknowledgments 159 Index 161 Editor’s Note My introduction broods on the elements of obsession that perhaps bind these late Shakespearean plays together. Northrop Frye sees in the romances and in The Winter’s Tale, in particu- lar, an embrace of spectacle and the primitive. Ruth Nevo speculates on genre complications as embodied by Cymbeline and its elements of the outlandish, coincidental, and grotesque. René Girard turns his attention to the textual rehabilitation of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, after which Arthur Kirsch deepens our sense of the link between Montaigne and The Tempest. Alan Stewart explores notions of friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen, followed by W.H. Auden, who sees Troilus and Cressida as advancing and working out Shakespeare’s stylistic challenges. Richard Harp then analyzes the role of providence in the late plays. The volume concludes with Alexander Leggatt’s view of All’s Well That Ends Well as a shadow Hamlet, in the ways the former interweaves its preoccupations with comedy and death. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction T he Anglo-Irish critic Edward Dowden, a friend of the poet W.B. Yeats’s family, created some long-range mischief when he first characterized a group of Shakespeare’s final plays as “romances.” Shakespeare, I suspect, thought of most of them as tragicomedies and may have regarded The Tem- pest as relatively unmixed comedy. But universal usage condemns us to call these visionary comedies romances, and so I will not argue the generic term here. Most of the “romantic” features of Cymbeline, Th e Winter’s Tale, Th e Tem- pest, and in the Shakespearean parts of Pericles and Th e Two Noble Kinsmen actually are more diverse than not and do not hold these fi ve very diff erent plays together as a group. While they are hardly Shakespeare’s only studies in obsessive quests, that may be the common element in these late tragicom- edies. Pericles mourns obsessively for his lost wife and daughter and, indeed, is traumatized before Marina restores him. Posthumus is almost more stupid than obsessive in his jealousy concerning Imogen, but he is insane enough to order her murdered. Th e cosmological fear of supposedly having been cuck- olded is too titanic to be termed Leontes’s obsession; a stronger term even than madness seems required. Prospero, in Th e Tempest, might seem too wise a hermeticist, too much an anti-Faust to fi t this pattern. And yet the deep scheme of his art has its compulsive strains; to win power over all his enemies, for whatever purpose, does not seem a wholly adequate project for a magus who tells us that he has raised the dead. Something obsessive urges Prospero on, though we cannot wholly grasp what that is. 1 2 Harold Bloom In Th e Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare ends his career with an extraor- dinary vision of erotic obsessiveness, so extreme that some revulsion from desire has to be argued as central to Shakespeare’s share in the work. It seems odd that obsessiveness should be represented with diff erent modes of autho- rial estrangement in these fi ve late plays. Pericles (again, the Shakespearean acts 3 and 4) is a formal pageant, a kind of processional. Cymbeline, in my judgment, is partly a Shakespearean self-parody; many of his prior plays and characters are mocked by it. Perhaps Th e Winter’s Tale is less a manifestation of the poet’s detachment; there are more of Shakespeare’s peculiar powers in it even than in Th e Tempest, but the conclusion, whether statue or long- hidden woman revives, seems to be an abatement of the pastoral ecstasy of Perdita’s marvelous epiphany in act 4, scene 4. I myself go with Autolycus, for whom the play is a romantic comedy, rather than a romance. Prospero’s coldness, Ariel’s nonhuman delicacy, and Caliban’s half- human resentment (exalted by many these days as a heroic anticolonialism) do not render Th e Tempest less of a comedy, but they help augment our dis- tance from what is represented onstage. Th e Two Noble Kinsmen is almost its own genre, one that I cannot imag- ine sustaining any further development. Shakespeare’s own stance in regard to it is a little uncanny; he has been repelled by Mars before and suff ered from Venus, but both are dismissed here with a new completeness. I have been suggesting that what holds the fi ve “late romances” together (if they are so held at all) is a fresh stylization and formalized detachment in the representation of heightened conditions of obsession. Shakespeare’s art certainly was not waning, but his interest in it probably was. NORTHROP FRYE Shakespeare’s Romances: Th e Winter’s Tale T he First Folio says it contains Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies, and that suggests a division of the main genres of Shakespeare’s plays that has pretty well held the field ever since. The main change has been that we now tend to think of four very late plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, as “romances,” to distinguish them from the earlier comedies. These plays reflect a new vogue in playwriting, which Shakespeare probably established, and in which he was followed by younger writers, notably Fletcher and his collaborator Beaumont. One of these plays, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, has a preface that speaks of its being in a new form described as a “tragicomedy.” These four romances have not always been favourites: only The Tempest has steadily held the stage, though it’s often done so in some very curious distortions, and Pericles and Cymbe- line, though superbly actable, are not very often performed even now. Nevertheless, the romances are popular plays, not popular in the sense of giving the public what it wants, which is a pretty silly phrase anyway, but popular in the sense of coming down to the audience response at its most fun- damental level. We noticed a primitive quality in Measure for Measure linking it with folk tales, and there’s a close affi nity between the romances and the most primitive (and therefore most enduring) forms of drama, like the pup- pet show. To mention some of their characteristics: fi rst, there’s a noticeable From Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, edited by Robert Sandler, pp. 154–70. Copyright © 1986 by Northrop Frye. 3